- costs me thousands of dollars, check - will talk constantly, check - will never come across with a blowjob or sex, check.
Yep, it's practically a real girl. At least this one comes with two positive aspects. 1) the impossibility of sex is clear from the start 2) I can terminate it or throw it in the trunk of my car without uncomfortable questions.
"Banking should be a service to industry that facilitates socially useful capital and equity, not be an industry in its own right."
Then please, be the first one to go out there and start such a bank. Are you going to be compensated for your time, costs? Sure you are. So now, on top of storing people's money, you're charging people for it, either as service fees or in interest on loans. Even if you just want to get paid a reasonable salary, how do you respond to the OWS protestors who claim you're making too much?
Ironically, your viewpoint was echoed by ancient authorities who banned usury. Of course, commerce as a concept, as well as the rise of the middle class, was pretty much predicated on liquid capital and the availability of loans.
MMOs are a popular genre, both for players (who get a broader, more varied, interactive social experience unlike they can get in any 1st person solo game) and for developers (your 1st person game sells 100,000 copies in the 1st year, you make $5 million; your MMO sells 100k copies, you make that $5 mill plus ANOTHER $9mill in subscriptions).
But as the shine has worn off the apple, customers are getting more sophisticated. More competition means that a successful MMO needs to be a AAA-grade title all the time. Further, and to the point of the OP, players might be starting to look at the $180/year they're spending on that game and wonder if that's not a little high for the rental of some imagination time.
Many vendors (and I'm certain Blizz is going that way as WoW reaches senescence) have dropped into a micropayment model. I originally thought it was a good idea. Many implementations leave a reasonable amount of game that's playable for free, and the upper reaches (for the hardcore) cost $$.
I'm no longer convinced that's sustainable. The micropay model is so jarringly destructive of suspension of disbelief, and as a player you constantly run into what amounts to commercials or purchase options it tears you completely out of the game experience.
....fire the guy whose catastrophically stupid idea that was.
And probably his boss, for approving it.
Seriously, it was an abortion from the first moment. Conceiving it, communicating it, championing it, apologizing for it, then backing away from it - all a disaster.
OK, credit them one TEENSY bit for finally acknowledging that annoying their ENTIRE customer base, making using their service MORE difficult to use, and then resisting to almost the last man until finally capitulating was stupid. Um, congrats?
I know it's crazy to so much of the leftward-leaning slashdot crowd, but is it so crazy to ask WHY a tax would be justified before implementing ANOTHER method of the government intruding into the otherwise-private transactions between people?
(And please note: our elected representatives being too stupid for several decades to balance a checkbook and spend less than they have available ISN'T ipso facto a valid reason to take more money from the public.)
To lay it out clearly: - in terms of hard infrastructure, everything has already been paid for. There's no 'state-provided' street or sidewalk on which this business is taking place, nor a state-built thoroughfare upon which a consumer has to travel to visit a store. Yes, the US gov't invented the internet, but for at least the last dozen years every iota of bandwith on which our (consumer's) signals travel is paid for commercially, and the costs passed down to either we the consumers (through our ISPs) or the businesses (through their providers) - whatever actual physical location a business has somewhere, the services that they consume (fire, police, etc.) from the government are already paid for in their property taxes. Self-evidently there's no need for police services for the sorts of store loss-prevention actions (shoplifters, etc) for internet stores. - I don't see the government providing any specific security for internet transactions; there's no government-security function backing https, nor any other transaction security system with an official imprimatur. I'm fine with this, by the way, I'm just saying that one of the legitimate reasons we pay taxes is the security and stable society under which the transaction is able to occur. This isn't present, as far as I can tell, on the internet. - sure there are some internet investigations going on but I see these as other issues - I don't see a lot of prosecutions for internet fraud (could just be my ignorance), certainly nothing to justify the massive amount of cash that would be garnered from a broadly-asserted internet sales tax.
In short, simply because the government needs money, and can take it, doesn't mean we need to tolerate it blithely like sheep.
That's a staggering statement, coming from someone living in 2011.
I mean, think about the tech developments in the last 10-15 years and the impact on our society. Perhaps the very medium we're using to argue?
Internet forum posts are famous for their presentation of "facts" which were in truth pulled from one's butt. But that statement that something is going to happen faster than tech can react, that's an astonishing level of tendentious mendacity, or simple disingenuity
You're right we're running out of oil. Really soon, too! I mean, it must be true, since they said it in 1920, 1950, 1970... Oops, actually, our reserves have constantly INCREASED since those first FUD announcments. Oh snap!
Is oil finite? Yep. Will the market respond? Yep. As oil becomes scarcer and scarcer, petroleum products will become more expensive. Thus the reason to innovate with something else - or figure out an easier way to recycle the extant products. Or, as has happened for the last 80 years, rising prices and advancing tech will make other oil resources formerly unreachable (or at least economically unreachable) available. If it doesn't, petro products will rise in price. Pretty damn simple.
I always wonder why econuts are so desperate to ensure that the petrol economy is sustainable. For now, as long as plastic is still the cheapest way for Sam Walton to hand me to carry my crap out of Wal-Mart, or for McDonalds to encase my Royale With Cheese, I'm not terrified that we're running out of oil tomorrow.
Well, unless the government is there, and because of purchased "interests" and vote counts (corporate bosses = Republicans, organized labor = Democrats) decides that the old company - regardless of how the perform in the market - is "too big to fail".
Then the startup is carefully regulated out of business, while gobs of tax dollars are used to spackle the disintegrating facade of the big older firm.
Sea levels rising for cyclical climatological reasons (ie long before Republicans driving SUVs) ruins the narrative. Ergo, tsunami "must have done it".
I'll be very clear about why I'm "rejecting certain scientific facts". In fact, I don't think I'm rejecting "facts"...I'm rejecting what I believe are tendentious conclusions that aren't necessarily supported by the facts themselves.
Is the globe warming? Could be. In fact, I'm going to say it probably is. From everything I've seen, as well as according to common sense and the fact that just about every human process generates heat or exacerbates solar heating, it would make sense that the atmosphere is warming. Whether human-created CO2 exacerbates this (to a degree that exceeds the natural 'static' of the system, water vapor, solar forcing, etc.) to me has not yet been concluded by the science.
The Vostok data (ice cores) suggests that the temperature pulses (in some cases radically) about every 100k-120k years. It seems hard to believe that the current 'pulse' is anything different than the previous 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg
Yes, some people claim "but this one is so much faster because it's human-caused!" Frankly, that's bullshit. We don't know that, as the resolution from ice core data is insufficient to clarify time spans as small as we're measuring ourselves - and that is the verbatim opinion from a climatologist.
No, I would agree that climate is perhaps changing (although a 100-year change is the merest blip in terms of "climate" - it's practically still just weather). I'm not convinced that it's quite the FUD that the Left - for whom climate change dovetails so neatly and conveniently into their political goals - would like us to believe.
In the closest conclusion this series has ever seen, Mozilla is finally able to take the crown, earning its first Web Browser Grand Prix championship with Firefox 7. Although Firefox has two fewer wins than Chrome 14, Mozilla's browser manages to earn three more strong finishes than Chrome, which we consider sealing the deal, if by only a hair.
Chrome 14 obviously places second; no surprise there. The big surprise is our third-place finisher. It's not Internet Explorer 9! Rather, Opera finally breaks out of fourth place and grabs the bronze medal. IE9 simply lost too many times, allowing Opera and its "minor".01 update to swoop in for the kill.
Alas, Safari places last yet again. Safari for Windows, that is. If Web Browser Grand Prix VI: Firefox 6, Chrome 13, Mac OS X Lion taught us anything, it's that the rules of physics, common sense, and everything else you hold dear don't apply on Apple's own OS X platform. Over there, Safari is still king.
"These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural"
Why?
Ice melting fast != humans at fault. Honestly, I've seen a lake go from "safe to walk on" to "no trace of ice" in a few days. I never once thought "Holy crap, some dude must have caused this!"
Certainly, that's the ASSUMPTION, and there are a lot of credible reasons for believing that to be true. But I don't see how A logically follows B unless you're already certain that B is true and just looking for more reasons to say it.
So, cloud services sometimes go down? My local browser client crashes occasionally too.
The point being that if it's a system that will allow (generally) faster/smoother delivery of content to mobile endusers, that's a great thing. Yes, the 'cloud' might fail occasionally, but I don't know if you've ever browsed through your phone before but it's a fairly shitty experience anyway, and you'd ostensibly have a current-standard client browser available as a backup if the cloud-failure is persistent, no?
I'm glad to see that we can finally dump that silly imperial system and get to a set of eminently sensible standards and measures that aren't obscure and/or arbitrary.
Because when I want to buy meat, I certainly first think "how will this pile of hamburger relate to the Planck constant?"
Ironic that in the preceding century we seem to have lost the appreciation that climate changes in cycles, and that the results can be both negative and positive but in a basic sense - like every other living creature - we're stuck with simply coping or dying.
Earth, regardless, will continue to spin merrily along whether we infest its skin or not. 99%+ of all species that have ever existed are extinct, so clearly that doesn't have squat for an impact.
My point is that protesting "Wall Street" is like protesting wolves eating meat.
However, since the politics of the people protesting are what they are, it's more...useful...to attention-whore on the sidewalk in front of Wall Street traders instead of the government that allowed, nay, encouraged the rapine of our economy and have refused to hold anyone accountable.
As an example, I don't even resent Goldman Sachs. They are what they are. What I find repellent is the revolving-door government(s) of the world that are made up of GS alumni and guys who will be employed by GS within moments of leaving their government office.
WHEN 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail. What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.
âoeWe bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,â one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. âoeIâ(TM)ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.â
Another said: âoeI took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot.â Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: âoeSod off, Swampy.â
I had plenty of experience with anti-CIA recruitment protesters in college, and the charming anti-Republican protesters last year in St Paul. I really couldn't imagine possibly feeling sorry for them. They're repellent self-righteous zealots who are utterly obnoxious regardless of their cause, or even whether they're right or not. Even if I'd agreed with their point of view, I'd want them off my side.
Sorry if I was unclear. They perform the "contact" - unless both parties confirm that they want to connect, there's no information actually shared. (Which is reasonable, in my view.)
My point is that making that 'contact' could be as complicated as opening a file, and calling that phone number. (Probably, there's going to be a little bit of research, but in easy cases probably less than 15 minutes.) That call - to check and see if contact is warranted - $250 seems prohibitive, and almost punitive.
I entirely agree with an hourly rate, even a steep one, if it's hard to track someone down, or if there is going to be contact (for which they offer counseling and a sort of willingness to mediate, so to speak)..all those would take time and certainly cost $$. But to make the "is contact wanted" check cost $250 is unreasonable in my view.
You don't have to go back to the flippin' Dead Sea Scrolls to see how people try to gain power through hoarding information.
Today I switched doctors. I have a new Dr. appointment Thursday (relatively soon). Both the destination clinic, and the origin clinic state that it takes 5-7 days to transfer my medical records completely.
I've said that I'd be willing to physically go and pick up my records, and transport them. But I CANNOT.
Oh I can, for a FEE. It will cost in copying charges around $50 if I want to pick up my records myself. It's done for free if it's being transferred to another clinic.
My records. About me. The accumulation of which were services for which I'm sure I or my insurance company already paid quite handsomely.
And yet this medical clinic clearly has emplaced a fee to discourage people from getting their OWN medical records.
No, it's not the Dead Sea Scrolls but it's power-through-information-hoarding.
Another example? I was adopted. The agency that holds my adoptive records offers the 'de-identified' record for $50. Fine, it takes some labor to accumulate this. (Never mind that this might contain critical medical information needed by the adoptee.) However, to advance that, and see if my birth mother is reachable, is $250. Regardless of effort. If it's a matter of opening the file, finding her name, and calling the number - it's $250.
To me, that's information hoarding. I don't object to paying $50/hour or whatever for research services. I don't object to paying for the labor and legwork involving tracking down and contacting a person in what might be a very delicate situation. I have no issues there. But to have to pony up $250 for what might be 5 minutes' work for no result, from an agency which is the SOLE source of critical information?
I did something relatively like this (albeit smaller scale) when I was a 8th grader in the early 80's, learning BASIC.
One of the first programs I actually wrote myself instead of laboriously copying out of a book or a magazine was "Monkeys" - this was a program that randomly generated letters and added them to the right end of a string, checked the string against a target value, and if it didn't fit, deleted the leftmost character to the string.
If a$="tobeornottobethatisthequestion" then b$="The monkeys have succeeded in writing Shakespeare!"
This was on an Apple II, but it ran every time the computer wasn't being used, probably months over the course of a year. My monkeys never succeeded. Stupid monkeys.
I know at least in my state, the University of MN was founded as a land grant university - a publicly-funded institution dedicated to the dissemination and advancement of scientific knowledge (primarily agriculture at the time) to its citizens.
This usually meant the granting of land and occasionally buildings to the school, as well as public funding and tax exemptions.
If the STATE schools want to educate foreign and out-of-state students preferentially, that's fine. Let's pull their land-grant status, stop all public funding, hell, let's let them pay property taxes too.
Slashdot Mirror
- costs me thousands of dollars, check
- will talk constantly, check
- will never come across with a blowjob or sex, check.
Yep, it's practically a real girl. At least this one comes with two positive aspects.
1) the impossibility of sex is clear from the start
2) I can terminate it or throw it in the trunk of my car without uncomfortable questions.
"Banking should be a service to industry that facilitates socially useful capital and equity, not be an industry in its own right."
Then please, be the first one to go out there and start such a bank. Are you going to be compensated for your time, costs? Sure you are. So now, on top of storing people's money, you're charging people for it, either as service fees or in interest on loans. Even if you just want to get paid a reasonable salary, how do you respond to the OWS protestors who claim you're making too much?
Ironically, your viewpoint was echoed by ancient authorities who banned usury. Of course, commerce as a concept, as well as the rise of the middle class, was pretty much predicated on liquid capital and the availability of loans.
Agreed.
MMOs are a popular genre, both for players (who get a broader, more varied, interactive social experience unlike they can get in any 1st person solo game) and for developers (your 1st person game sells 100,000 copies in the 1st year, you make $5 million; your MMO sells 100k copies, you make that $5 mill plus ANOTHER $9mill in subscriptions).
But as the shine has worn off the apple, customers are getting more sophisticated. More competition means that a successful MMO needs to be a AAA-grade title all the time. Further, and to the point of the OP, players might be starting to look at the $180/year they're spending on that game and wonder if that's not a little high for the rental of some imagination time.
Many vendors (and I'm certain Blizz is going that way as WoW reaches senescence) have dropped into a micropayment model. I originally thought it was a good idea. Many implementations leave a reasonable amount of game that's playable for free, and the upper reaches (for the hardcore) cost $$.
I'm no longer convinced that's sustainable. The micropay model is so jarringly destructive of suspension of disbelief, and as a player you constantly run into what amounts to commercials or purchase options it tears you completely out of the game experience.
So you're saying we have a president now who really is just a full-time campaigner?
How...wonderful?
....fire the guy whose catastrophically stupid idea that was.
And probably his boss, for approving it.
Seriously, it was an abortion from the first moment. Conceiving it, communicating it, championing it, apologizing for it, then backing away from it - all a disaster.
OK, credit them one TEENSY bit for finally acknowledging that annoying their ENTIRE customer base, making using their service MORE difficult to use, and then resisting to almost the last man until finally capitulating was stupid. Um, congrats?
I know it's crazy to so much of the leftward-leaning slashdot crowd, but is it so crazy to ask WHY a tax would be justified before implementing ANOTHER method of the government intruding into the otherwise-private transactions between people?
(And please note: our elected representatives being too stupid for several decades to balance a checkbook and spend less than they have available ISN'T ipso facto a valid reason to take more money from the public.)
To lay it out clearly:
- in terms of hard infrastructure, everything has already been paid for. There's no 'state-provided' street or sidewalk on which this business is taking place, nor a state-built thoroughfare upon which a consumer has to travel to visit a store. Yes, the US gov't invented the internet, but for at least the last dozen years every iota of bandwith on which our (consumer's) signals travel is paid for commercially, and the costs passed down to either we the consumers (through our ISPs) or the businesses (through their providers)
- whatever actual physical location a business has somewhere, the services that they consume (fire, police, etc.) from the government are already paid for in their property taxes. Self-evidently there's no need for police services for the sorts of store loss-prevention actions (shoplifters, etc) for internet stores.
- I don't see the government providing any specific security for internet transactions; there's no government-security function backing https, nor any other transaction security system with an official imprimatur. I'm fine with this, by the way, I'm just saying that one of the legitimate reasons we pay taxes is the security and stable society under which the transaction is able to occur. This isn't present, as far as I can tell, on the internet.
- sure there are some internet investigations going on but I see these as other issues - I don't see a lot of prosecutions for internet fraud (could just be my ignorance), certainly nothing to justify the massive amount of cash that would be garnered from a broadly-asserted internet sales tax.
In short, simply because the government needs money, and can take it, doesn't mean we need to tolerate it blithely like sheep.
"Faster than technology can react to compensate."
Really?
That's a staggering statement, coming from someone living in 2011.
I mean, think about the tech developments in the last 10-15 years and the impact on our society. Perhaps the very medium we're using to argue?
Internet forum posts are famous for their presentation of "facts" which were in truth pulled from one's butt. But that statement that something is going to happen faster than tech can react, that's an astonishing level of tendentious mendacity, or simple disingenuity
You're right we're running out of oil. Really soon, too! I mean, it must be true, since they said it in 1920, 1950, 1970...
Oops, actually, our reserves have constantly INCREASED since those first FUD announcments. Oh snap!
Is oil finite? Yep.
Will the market respond? Yep. As oil becomes scarcer and scarcer, petroleum products will become more expensive. Thus the reason to innovate with something else - or figure out an easier way to recycle the extant products.
Or, as has happened for the last 80 years, rising prices and advancing tech will make other oil resources formerly unreachable (or at least economically unreachable) available. If it doesn't, petro products will rise in price. Pretty damn simple.
I always wonder why econuts are so desperate to ensure that the petrol economy is sustainable. For now, as long as plastic is still the cheapest way for Sam Walton to hand me to carry my crap out of Wal-Mart, or for McDonalds to encase my Royale With Cheese, I'm not terrified that we're running out of oil tomorrow.
Well, unless the government is there, and because of purchased "interests" and vote counts (corporate bosses = Republicans, organized labor = Democrats) decides that the old company - regardless of how the perform in the market - is "too big to fail".
Then the startup is carefully regulated out of business, while gobs of tax dollars are used to spackle the disintegrating facade of the big older firm.
Sea levels rising for cyclical climatological reasons (ie long before Republicans driving SUVs) ruins the narrative. Ergo, tsunami "must have done it".
But in any case, the damage is limited to the lifespan of the patent holder, at the worst.
I'll be very clear about why I'm "rejecting certain scientific facts".
In fact, I don't think I'm rejecting "facts"...I'm rejecting what I believe are tendentious conclusions that aren't necessarily supported by the facts themselves.
Is the globe warming? Could be. In fact, I'm going to say it probably is. From everything I've seen, as well as according to common sense and the fact that just about every human process generates heat or exacerbates solar heating, it would make sense that the atmosphere is warming.
Whether human-created CO2 exacerbates this (to a degree that exceeds the natural 'static' of the system, water vapor, solar forcing, etc.) to me has not yet been concluded by the science.
The Vostok data (ice cores) suggests that the temperature pulses (in some cases radically) about every 100k-120k years. It seems hard to believe that the current 'pulse' is anything different than the previous 4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg
Yes, some people claim "but this one is so much faster because it's human-caused!" Frankly, that's bullshit. We don't know that, as the resolution from ice core data is insufficient to clarify time spans as small as we're measuring ourselves - and that is the verbatim opinion from a climatologist.
No, I would agree that climate is perhaps changing (although a 100-year change is the merest blip in terms of "climate" - it's practically still just weather). I'm not convinced that it's quite the FUD that the Left - for whom climate change dovetails so neatly and conveniently into their political goals - would like us to believe.
I know that there are probably issues with this, but could the bulk of patent problems be solved if we simply made them non-transferable?
In the closest conclusion this series has ever seen, Mozilla is finally able to take the crown, earning its first Web Browser Grand Prix championship with Firefox 7. Although Firefox has two fewer wins than Chrome 14, Mozilla's browser manages to earn three more strong finishes than Chrome, which we consider sealing the deal, if by only a hair.
Chrome 14 obviously places second; no surprise there. The big surprise is our third-place finisher. It's not Internet Explorer 9! Rather, Opera finally breaks out of fourth place and grabs the bronze medal. IE9 simply lost too many times, allowing Opera and its "minor" .01 update to swoop in for the kill.
Alas, Safari places last yet again. Safari for Windows, that is. If Web Browser Grand Prix VI: Firefox 6, Chrome 13, Mac OS X Lion taught us anything, it's that the rules of physics, common sense, and everything else you hold dear don't apply on Apple's own OS X platform. Over there, Safari is still king.
"These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural"
Why?
Ice melting fast != humans at fault. Honestly, I've seen a lake go from "safe to walk on" to "no trace of ice" in a few days. I never once thought "Holy crap, some dude must have caused this!"
Certainly, that's the ASSUMPTION, and there are a lot of credible reasons for believing that to be true. But I don't see how A logically follows B unless you're already certain that B is true and just looking for more reasons to say it.
So, cloud services sometimes go down? My local browser client crashes occasionally too.
The point being that if it's a system that will allow (generally) faster/smoother delivery of content to mobile endusers, that's a great thing. Yes, the 'cloud' might fail occasionally, but I don't know if you've ever browsed through your phone before but it's a fairly shitty experience anyway, and you'd ostensibly have a current-standard client browser available as a backup if the cloud-failure is persistent, no?
I'm glad to see that we can finally dump that silly imperial system and get to a set of eminently sensible standards and measures that aren't obscure and/or arbitrary.
Because when I want to buy meat, I certainly first think "how will this pile of hamburger relate to the Planck constant?"
Ironic that in the preceding century we seem to have lost the appreciation that climate changes in cycles, and that the results can be both negative and positive but in a basic sense - like every other living creature - we're stuck with simply coping or dying.
Earth, regardless, will continue to spin merrily along whether we infest its skin or not. 99%+ of all species that have ever existed are extinct, so clearly that doesn't have squat for an impact.
My point is that protesting "Wall Street" is like protesting wolves eating meat.
However, since the politics of the people protesting are what they are, it's more...useful...to attention-whore on the sidewalk in front of Wall Street traders instead of the government that allowed, nay, encouraged the rapine of our economy and have refused to hold anyone accountable.
As an example, I don't even resent Goldman Sachs. They are what they are. What I find repellent is the revolving-door government(s) of the world that are made up of GS alumni and guys who will be employed by GS within moments of leaving their government office.
Hopefully it will turn out like this:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article515384.ece
I had plenty of experience with anti-CIA recruitment protesters in college, and the charming anti-Republican protesters last year in St Paul. I really couldn't imagine possibly feeling sorry for them. They're repellent self-righteous zealots who are utterly obnoxious regardless of their cause, or even whether they're right or not. Even if I'd agreed with their point of view, I'd want them off my side.
Sorry if I was unclear.
They perform the "contact" - unless both parties confirm that they want to connect, there's no information actually shared. (Which is reasonable, in my view.)
My point is that making that 'contact' could be as complicated as opening a file, and calling that phone number. (Probably, there's going to be a little bit of research, but in easy cases probably less than 15 minutes.) That call - to check and see if contact is warranted - $250 seems prohibitive, and almost punitive.
I entirely agree with an hourly rate, even a steep one, if it's hard to track someone down, or if there is going to be contact (for which they offer counseling and a sort of willingness to mediate, so to speak)..all those would take time and certainly cost $$. But to make the "is contact wanted" check cost $250 is unreasonable in my view.
You don't have to go back to the flippin' Dead Sea Scrolls to see how people try to gain power through hoarding information.
Today I switched doctors.
I have a new Dr. appointment Thursday (relatively soon). Both the destination clinic, and the origin clinic state that it takes 5-7 days to transfer my medical records completely.
I've said that I'd be willing to physically go and pick up my records, and transport them. But I CANNOT.
Oh I can, for a FEE.
It will cost in copying charges around $50 if I want to pick up my records myself. It's done for free if it's being transferred to another clinic.
My records. About me. The accumulation of which were services for which I'm sure I or my insurance company already paid quite handsomely.
And yet this medical clinic clearly has emplaced a fee to discourage people from getting their OWN medical records.
No, it's not the Dead Sea Scrolls but it's power-through-information-hoarding.
Another example?
I was adopted. The agency that holds my adoptive records offers the 'de-identified' record for $50. Fine, it takes some labor to accumulate this. (Never mind that this might contain critical medical information needed by the adoptee.)
However, to advance that, and see if my birth mother is reachable, is $250.
Regardless of effort. If it's a matter of opening the file, finding her name, and calling the number - it's $250.
To me, that's information hoarding. I don't object to paying $50/hour or whatever for research services. I don't object to paying for the labor and legwork involving tracking down and contacting a person in what might be a very delicate situation. I have no issues there. But to have to pony up $250 for what might be 5 minutes' work for no result, from an agency which is the SOLE source of critical information?
...these results were calculated in ITALY.
I don't know about you, but according to my experience, NOTHING runs on time there.
Not even neutrinos.
So the idea that they arrived early? hahaha, clearly a clock error.
I did something relatively like this (albeit smaller scale) when I was a 8th grader in the early 80's, learning BASIC.
One of the first programs I actually wrote myself instead of laboriously copying out of a book or a magazine was "Monkeys" - this was a program that randomly generated letters and added them to the right end of a string, checked the string against a target value, and if it didn't fit, deleted the leftmost character to the string.
If a$="tobeornottobethatisthequestion" then b$="The monkeys have succeeded in writing Shakespeare!"
This was on an Apple II, but it ran every time the computer wasn't being used, probably months over the course of a year. My monkeys never succeeded. Stupid monkeys.
I know at least in my state, the University of MN was founded as a land grant university - a publicly-funded institution dedicated to the dissemination and advancement of scientific knowledge (primarily agriculture at the time) to its citizens.
This usually meant the granting of land and occasionally buildings to the school, as well as public funding and tax exemptions.
If the STATE schools want to educate foreign and out-of-state students preferentially, that's fine. Let's pull their land-grant status, stop all public funding, hell, let's let them pay property taxes too.